Squash: Gents and ladies, I’ve been hanging around POLITICS and am experienced with a flavor of presup over there that looks a little like this.

P1: God is the necessary precondition for knowledge.
P2: Knowledge.
C: God.

When pushed for P1, I’ve heard a breakdown of theonomous vs. anonymous reasoning:
P1: Autonomous or theonomous reasoning (disjunctive syllogism).
P2: Autonomous reduces to absurdity.
C: Theonomous.

I have read very little Van Til, but have basic familiarity with Kant and his view of transcendentals. I’m curious to know the gist of the argument and how much it matches the form provided and what the distinction in transcendentals would be in a Kantian view vs. Van Til.

Nickk — 06/26/2024 5:58 PM: There’s different takes on the first syllogism in who thinks it’s a good or bad argument. There’s a guy by the name of “shotgun” who runs that kind of argument.

@Brooks W: I don’t know if you’d give a syllogism like that above.

@Satan For Christ doesn’t think presup is an argument, so generally speaking, he’d probably agree with it but think differently in how he’d go about a conversation about it.

Then there’s others who would have more sophisticated arguments for it. So there’s no strong agreement on the method per se. The principle will come down to something similar though.

@Squatch: Gents and ladies, I’ve been hanging around POLITICS and am experienced with a flavor of presup over there that looks a little like this. P1 god is the necessary precondition for knowledge P2 Knowledge C God and when pushed for p1 I’ve heard a breakdown of theonomous vs anonymous reasoning P1 autonymous or theonomous reasoning (disjunctive syllogism) P2 Autonomous reduces to absurdity c: theonomous I have read very little Van Til, but have basic familiarity with Kant and his view of transcendentals. I’m curious to know the gist of the argument and how much it matches the form provided and what the distinction in transcendentals would be in a kantian view vs van til.

Satan For Christ — 06/26/2024 6:24 PM: Nickk summed it up well. I don’t think so-called “presup” is really an argument – at least, not the way the Al-Ghazalian, Leibnizian, or Anselmian methods are often reduced to a formal argument. What Van Til and his followers developed is an epistemology. The goal was to have a philosophical outlook and a theory of metaphysics and knowledge based on the Reformed doctrines of God, man, salvation, and so forth.

The best way to think about Van Tilianism, I think, is to view it as a philosophical theology and the epistemology that comes with it. A transcendental critique, then, is Van Til’s reappropriation of an idealist insight: that reason is always bound to knowledge of the One who controls everything.

Brooks W — 06/26/2024 6:40 PM: I’d agree with Nickk. To respond to Nickk, I don’t see any issues with that syllogism (except in the second we usually say revelational epistemology or analogous reasoning rather than theonomous reasoning). I tend to only place TAG in a syllogism when seeking to demonstrate that it is logically valid and that a circular reasoning charge would be false. I’d also find agreement with @Satan For Christ. Van Tilianism is much more than an argument for God’s existence, but is also a worldview-system bridging together Reformed Theology with the branches of philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics), ensuring that the enterprise of apologetics remains consistent with these.

Satan For Christ — 06/26/2024 6:41 PM: I tend to only place TAG in a syllogism when seeking to demonstrate that it is logically valid and that a circular reasoning charge would be false.

Brooks W — 06/26/2024 6:42 PM:

Squatch — Yesterday at 11:53 AM: All, thanks for the engagement and replies. Let me throw a few things out here and see how they stick. I’m a bit new to all of this, so most of this is likely an incorrect assumption.

There are these concepts of transcendentals which would be “necessary” preconditions to account for intelligibility or knowledge (may be too sloppy here). They are things like logic, order, space, time, causality, etc. Theistically, I think things like morality and others are put on the list.

Hume showed us that none of these things could be accounted for non-subjectively, but Kant was inspired by Hume’s learnings and in a desire to preserve rationalism and metaphysics he showed that these things can be accounted for as synthetic a priori truths. E.g. necessary truths that emerge from the fact of experience, not the content of experience. I don’t think that Van Til would argue much with this, though I know that Van Til disputes some Kantian perspectives. However, it seems to me that Van Til has furthered this learning but is also going a step further and really flipping things on its head by starting with the presupposition that God exists and showing that it is the necessary presupposition to account for the transcendentals, though I’m not certain that his reference of transcendentals is quite the same.

A few things that I’m working through is that if I think about this from Kant’s perspective, I get to a spot where I don’t believe that knowledge and intelligibility need much if any specific grounding in ontology. In fact, Kant himself says that he set out to ground the transcendentals without any and prior to any metaphysical claims. This tells me that the argument is almost if not exclusively about epistemology.

^^ (continued)…because of this understanding, I’m not quite sure why Presup or TAG argue that God’s existence is the necessary precondition as that’s making an ontological claim, rather than as I believe the argument was originally intended, that the presupposition of God is what is necessary to ground intelligibility, leaving the argument in the strictly epistemological territory.

Thanks again for engaging.

Satan For Christ — Yesterday at 12:22 PM: I think you’re more or less right. A lot of the terminology just isn’t that important. “Intelligibility” is usually just inherited idiosyncratic language. Van Tilians usually just mean that something is a precondition for knowledge, or rationality more generally, and the idea can go as broad as a condition of life if it matters.

I think it’s easier to explain what Van Til’s transcendental critique idea is all about apart from the historical considerations. Those are extremely useful, but require a lot of unpacking. Put Hume, Kant, and Bosanquet aside for a moment.

Unbelievers are committed to autonomy. Meaning, they deeply believe their unbelief is rational, that knowledge of God is inessential, that obedience to Jesus is not immanently crucial to logic or ethics, etc. They have something and they don’t need Christ’s God to have it.

Autonomy, in turn, is rationalized by some specific worldview. This could be Jainism, Hegelian idealism, Odinism, whatever. Any and all of these are functioning as an account of autonomy, as the putative reason why unbelief is rational.

So Van Til’s idea is to argue that these worldviews make, say, knowledge impossible and so falsify autonomy. You can’t have autonomy without the worldview, but the worldview makes it impossible to have autonomy. The alternative is faith in Christ.

What you bring up at the end sounds like the Kantian noumenal-phenomenal division – I’m not sure. Stroud does a pretty good job explaining why modest transcendental arguments would not suffice for what Van Til is claiming.

Squatch — Today at 12:44 PM: I’d like to throw out a logical critique against the possibility of knowledge with a theonomous worldview.

One horn of transcendentals that I think would be destroyed is that of causality and the ability to reason about cause and effect.

Natural Order (N): Those events which will occur in creation without God’s intervention.
Supernatural Order (S): Those events that occur with God’s intervention.

The way knowledge would justify most events in a causal chain would be something like:

Supernatural Creation -> Natural causal events -> experienced phenomena.

God Exists -> Creation -> Natural Causal Events -> Experienced Phenomena.

Most people would reason back from any phenomenal experience down this causal chain.

However, with the possibility and expectation of a supervening God, the following causal chains are possible:

God Exists -> Creation -> Supernatural causal events -> experienced phenomena.
God Exists -> Creation -> Natural Causal Events -> Supernatural Causal Events -> Experienced Phenomena.

The core issue is that God can supervene in the expected series of events, but we would never be able to know the causal order of any experienced phenomena. There are multiple possible causal chains for any phenomena, and we could never reason to the truth of which actually occurred.

I kind of butchered this, but I’m exploring this, and I think it puts the idea on the table.

Nickk — Today at 12:57 PM: Was this the one you were talking to me about?

Squatch — Today at 12:58 PM: It’s basically the same thing. Yes. Slightly, hopefully more clearly illustrated. It’s focused on epistemology, not ontology.

Satan For Christ — Today at 12:59 PM: This is reminiscent of (one of) Michael Martin’s TANG, if it isn’t just the same thing. There’s a few issues here. One is that (N) does not exist in Christianity, so this is not an internal critique.

Squatch — Today at 1:00 PM: Yes, I get this, but maybe I need another word for it. There is a presupposed order of things post-creation that would normally occur without God further intervening. I’m calling that natural, but understand the lingual issue, but I don’t think that it changes the concern. Funny you say TANG, I heard it for the first and second time today. I came to this just reasoning through the implications of transcendental necessities for knowledge.

Satan For Christ — Today at 1:05 PM: You might want to look up the discourse between Michael Martin and Frame. They discussed this very objection. The problem is that Martin (and yourself) appear to be misconstruing what it means for God to “intervene.” It’s a conceptual problem, not a language issue.

The problem is that God is the orderer of nature, whether in a regular providential way or because He is performing something spectacular. So unless you want to say usual vs. unusual behavior in human beings makes the human mind unknowable, that distinction offers no real source of skepticism. There is no “this is the way waterfalls fall independent of God.” There is no “independent of God” period. All things happen because He causes them to happen that way.

Put another way, unusual ≠ irrational. Indeed, unusual does not even mean principally unpredictable.

The problem with non-Christian ideas of “mother nature” is there is no ultimate source of order, so there is no reason to expect anything whatsoever. That’s hardly comparable to saying what you can expect isn’t a perfect 1-1 infallible correspondence.

In case it was unclear, the comment about the human mind – that you could not treat as a skeptical scenario God’s unusual agency without treating unusual agency in human minds as a skeptical scenario generally – was an unexplicit comment that the problem would just become self-refuting. You need to rely on access to and/or familiarity with human minds generally to make this criticism of Christianity. But you cannot make this criticism without undermining said access/familiarity.

Or in simple terms, you can’t pose conditions for God if those conditions would make your own human agency a problem.

Nickk — Today at 1:47 PM: @Squatch and I talked about the nature of miracles with respect to the uniformity of nature a little bit ago. But I think you addressed the main idea of his pushback. Obviously not something you haven’t seen before.

Satan For Christ — Today at 1:56 PM: There’s a secondary issue as well (and there may be others). Another problem with this argument is that it hinges precariously on the claim that God’s agency is phenomenologically indifferent/neutral. Why believe that?

Bare minimum, the unbeliever will have to show (a) that is a Christian doctrine, by citing Scripture or some credal/confessional content agreed to by his opponent, or (b) show that it necessarily follows from some Christian doctrine. For one thing, I have never seen this done. To the contrary, it seems unbelievers for the most part assume too much. They merely assume this is the case because the appearance-reality distinction is unassailable for them. So it is a case of projection, misplaced external critique, even if it were accidentally true.

Furthermore, we know this isn’t the case in Christianity. We know that God’s miraculous works are not purposeless magic tricks. We know why He is doing what He is doing. He has told us in His word and more to the point, His “supernatural” works are for the express purpose of communicating something important to His creatures.

So not only does the objection project a naturalist picture of nature onto Christianity to the effect that, applied consistently, it refutes itself on top of being a straw man; it also confuses the epistemic status and eschatological role of miracles. It would be like complaining about a fellow human being that since speech is unusual compared to non-speech behaviors, we have to give up belief in speech to preserve our understanding of human behaviors.

I mean, quite frankly, this is all just unbelievers being unable to think outside their post-Enlightenment naturalist box. They’ve never even thought to consider the radical entailments of their own naturalist position or of how radically contrastive is Christianity’s view of nature – and who can blame them given the religious indoctrination in state schooling.

Squatch — Today at 2:52 PM: Thanks for engaging. Could you reframe your response somewhat in relation to my causal order “flows”? Do you dismiss them altogether or admit that there would be a causal difference in a supervened vs. non-supervened event? The issue is not about the ultimate source; it would be about the ability to reason through the causal chain of events.

In the case that God can supervene at any stage in the causal order, you could never know which experiences you can reason through conclusively. The only thing you could say at the outset is, everything is caused by God, and this is likely the way this particular phenomenal experience unfolded.

Satan For Christ — Today at 2:55 PM: My first objection was to reject (N). So the causal flows are either dismissed entirely or in need of drastic revision.

Squatch — Today at 2:58 PM: Every phenomenon would be explainable by driving through the series of causal events that lead to the phenomenon. There is going to be a requirement that there is a predictable order to that causal series in order to justify knowledge. The issue is that if God can supervene in any part of that causal chain, then we have no way to believe that our reasoning would come to the truth about the causal series.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:00 PM: I don’t know what “supervene” means other than to invoke (N), which I pointed out is a concept foreign to consistent Christianity.

Squatch — Today at 3:04 PM: Hmm, let me see if I can probe it to get to shared language. If I drop a ball and it falls to the ground, am I to suppose that gravity is acting on the ball in a certain and predictable way or that God is intervening and causing the ball to fall in a specific way counter to the laws of gravity?

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:04 PM: Those aren’t mutually exclusive, and gravity has no explanatory power independent of the latter. That’s what I meant when I said (N) doesn’t exist in Christianity. There are no God-independent causes.

Squatch — Today at 3:05 PM: Sure, I agree that gravity would still ground out in the supernatural, but it is a constant and consistent force. You mistake what I’m saying.

Nickk — Today at 3:06 PM: I think he’s saying why think God won’t just go on and make the ball fly away or something.

Squatch — Today at 3:06 PM: If we believe that God can supervene the force of gravity, then we could never know from one experience to the next whether we are experiencing the normal law of gravity or a supervened.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:06 PM: Yes, I understand. But that question is malformed if it resides on a naturalist conception of natural law or forces.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:07 PM: To build on your analogy, that is like saying, “I don’t know whether God causes gravity through angels, mass, or directly, so I could never know which.” Maybe, but how is that a skeptical problem? In all three cases, we have the same result. So what is the hoopla about?

Squatch — Today at 3:10 PM: I prefaced that it’s about justification for belief and supervening. It’s about the causal chain and the instability of it in a theonomous epistemology.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:10 PM: What I’m saying is, the possibility of God causing gravity through different instruments ≠ the possibility of God causing non-gravity. You seem to be relying on a minor confusion. On the one hand, you (correctly) say that God could use different means, prima facie, to cause gravity. Fair enough. On the other hand, you (incorrectly) say that God could cause situations other than gravity at any time, and you say (incorrectly) that this follows from the above correct statement.

Squatch — Today at 3:12 PM: Blow this out please. What do you mean by this?

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:13 PM: So, just for the sake of conversation, the imaginary scenario where God causes the earth to spin people off of it. That would be an exception to natural law, to the ordinary way God rules the cosmos. You’re claiming God could cause that, and you’re claiming that follows because God can cause what He causes through different instruments. Minimally, that doesn’t follow.

Squatch — Today at 3:14 PM: No, I don’t think I mentioned instruments. I’m not sure the relevance.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:15 PM: That’s what (N) or “Natural Causal Events” would be, at best. The only alternative is to think (N) is some kind of causal sufficient condition independent of God.

Squatch — Today at 3:15 PM: It would be fine for me to call that the ordinary way God rules the cosmos.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:16 PM: Okay, so what about God being able to rule in an ordinary fashion and in unordinary fashion entails He could rule in epistemically problematic fashions?

Squatch — Today at 3:18 PM: Yes, perfect. When you are reasoning about the causality of an event, you could never justify it because you would not be able to tell the difference between ordinary and non-ordinary causal chains. For any event, you could not be certain.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:18 PM: When reasoning about gravity, an ordinary event, I wouldn’t be able to tell it’s God’s ordinary providence? Because?

Squatch — Today at 3:19 PM: Well, you could do it inductively, but never with certainty.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:19 PM: So?

A… — Today at 3:19 PM: Why do we need to be certain?

Squatch — Today at 3:19 PM: Perfect. That’s all I need. You don’t have access to the truth.

A… — Today at 3:19 PM: Are you an Unger stan?

Nickk — Today at 3:20 PM: I can’t have access to truth through induction? Yikes, lol.

Squatch — Today at 3:20 PM: Nooph. But that’s an atheist perspective. Typically, presupp would show that theonomous reasoning is true because autonomous reasoning can’t justify to certainty.

A… — Today at 3:20 PM: Atheism says jack shit about certainty and epistemology. Atheism is just the negation of the God proposition. THAT’S IT. It’s not a worldview.

Nickk — Today at 3:20 PM: Or at least be justified.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:20 PM: Oh, that’s a sad misunderstanding. That sounds like a Sye Ten Bruggencate type of “presup.”

Nickk — Today at 3:21 PM: Well, that’s why I brought him here. Because that’s all he talks to, unfortunately.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:21 PM: Regarding induction, I would say it demands justification, but not necessarily an infalliblist model of justification. The error I would accuse atheism of making is having no justification, not that it lacks certitude.

Squatch — Today at 3:22 PM: Yes, this is totally fine with me. However, I think it shows both sides are on a similar epistemological plane.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:23 PM: I would have to respectfully disagree. The Christian has inductive reasons to believe this or that causal account and what it says for miracles. The unbeliever has no reason to believe this or that causal account whatsoever.

Squatch — Today at 3:24 PM: Well, maybe this is the side of the argument that I’m looking to hear then.

A… — Today at 3:25 PM: It’s true they must use a presupposition. Just a presupper on a different thing.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:26 PM: Gotta join the one-true-myth crew, laddy. Parable of the poisoned arrow and all that. Jesus solves our sin, my bro.

Squatch — Today at 3:27 PM: I think that the only infallible portion that arises from experiences would be the transcendentals, which would be the necessary preconditions for experience. However, attributing meaning or cause to any experience would always be focused on the justification of the phenomenon, not the thing in itself.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:29 PM: I maybe understand you, but I’m not confident. Here’s what I understand you to be saying, correct me if it’s inaccurate. Because there is a categorical distinction, that is, a distinction made the case by the very objects in view, between appearance and reality or phenomenon and its cause, there is no justification for beliefs about one sufficient to justify beliefs about the other. Just because I have a reason to believe there was a phenomenon or appearance says nothing about the reality or cause of it.

I’m gonna have to take off here for a bit. If you don’t mind, are you approaching these topics as a believer or are you not a Christian? Your name makes me wonder if we crossed paths long ago.

Squatch — Today at 3:31 PM: Basically, I’m saying that the infallible items seem to be only a priori. Anything a posteriori would be potentially fallible.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:32 PM: Excellent clarification – thank you! I think that’s incoherent. I’ll respond when I get a chance.

Actually, I think I can preview one argument about this that’s really simple:

P1. If no infallible justification accrues for synthetic statements, then there are no infallible justifications.
P2. There is infallible justification.
C: Infallible justification accrues for synthetic statements.

And then the argument for P1 is just going to be the observation that there are no true analytic truths. Analyticity is relative. All statements are one degree of synthetic or another.

Squatch — Today at 3:38 PM: Interesting you say this because I was listening to the Russell Coplestone debate and recalled that Coplestone believed that all statements boil down to only analytic statements. I’m not far enough educated to realize the entailments exactly.

Satan For Christ — Today at 3:39 PM: Yeah, I think that’s true in a different sense as well. All statements are analytic from the perspective of an omniscient Being. No statements are analytic from any other perspective. The alternative is going to lead to epistemic fragmentalism, or the idea that not all things entail each other, and therefore, that for whatever epistemic paradigm you have, there are falsifying exceptions. In which case, knowledge is straightforwardly impossible.